OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Effectiveness of Data Augmentation for Parameter Efficient Tuning with Limited Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Recent work has demonstrated that using parameter efficient tuning techniques such as prefix tuning (or P-tuning) on pretrained language models can yield performance that is comparable or superior to fine-tuning while dramatically reducing trainable parameters. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of such methods under the context of data augmentation, a common strategy to improve learning under low data regimes, has not been fully explored. In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of several popular task-agnostic data augmentation techniques, i.e., EDA, Back Translation, and Mixup, when using two general parameter efficient tuning methods, P-tuning v2 and LoRA, under data scarcity. We show that data augmentation can be used to boost the performance of P-tuning and LoRA models, but the effectiveness of each technique varies and certain methods can lead to a notable degradation in performance, particularly when using larger models and on harder tasks. We further analyze the sentence representations of P-tuning compared to fine-tuning to help understand the above behaviour, and reveal how P-tuning generally presents a more limited ability to separate the sentence embeddings from different classes of augmented data. In addition, it displays poorer performance on heavily altered data. However, we demonstrate that by adding a simple contrastive loss function it can help mitigate such issues for prefix tuning, resulting in sizable improvements to augmented data performance.
From Rolling Over to Walking: Enabling Humanoid Robots to Develop Complex Motor Skills
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents an innovative method for humanoid robots to acquire a comprehensive set of motor skills through reinforcement learning. The approach utilizes an achievement-triggered multi-path reward function rooted in developmental robotics principles, facilitating the robot to learn gross motor skills typically mastered by human infants within a single training phase. The proposed method outperforms standard reinforcement learning techniques in success rates and learning speed within a simulation environment. By leveraging the principles of self-discovery and exploration integral to infant learning, this method holds the potential to significantly advance humanoid robot motor skill acquisition.
Expectation consistency for calibration of neural networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Despite their incredible performance, it is well reported that deep neural networks tend to be overoptimistic about their prediction confidence. Finding effective and efficient calibration methods for neural networks is therefore an important endeavour towards better uncertainty quantification in deep learning. In this manuscript, we introduce a novel calibration technique named expectation consistency (EC), consisting of a post-training rescaling of the last layer weights by enforcing that the average validation confidence coincides with the average proportion of correct labels. First, we show that the EC method achieves similar calibration performance to temperature scaling (TS) across different neural network architectures and data sets, all while requiring similar validation samples and computational resources. However, we argue that EC provides a principled method grounded on a Bayesian optimality principle known as the Nishimori identity. Next, we provide an asymptotic characterization of both TS and EC in a synthetic setting and show that their performance crucially depends on the target function. In particular, we discuss examples where EC significantly outperforms TS.
Cyber Vaccine for Deepfake Immunity
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Deepfakes pose an evolving threat to cybersecurity, which calls for the development of automated countermeasures. While considerable forensic research has been devoted to the detection and localisation of deepfakes, solutions for reversing fake to real are yet to be developed. In this study, we introduce cyber vaccination for conferring immunity to deepfakes. Analogous to biological vaccination that injects antigens to induce immunity prior to infection by an actual pathogen, cyber vaccination simulates deepfakes and performs adversarial training to build a defensive immune system. Aiming at building up attack-agnostic immunity with limited computational resources, we propose to simulate various deepfakes with one single overpowered attack: face masking. The proposed immune system consists of a vaccinator for inducing immunity and a neutraliser for recovering facial content. Experimental evaluations demonstrate effective immunity to face replacement, face reenactment and various types of corruptions.
A Provably Secure Strong PUF based on LWE: Construction and Implementation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

We construct a strong PUF with provable security against ML attacks on both classical and quantum computers. The security is guaranteed by the cryptographic hardness of learning decryption functions of public-key cryptosystems, and the hardness of the learning-with-errors (LWE) problem defined on integer lattices. We call our construction the lattice PUF. We construct lattice PUF with a physically obfuscated key and an LWE decryption function block. To allow deployments in different scenarios, we demonstrate designs with different latency-area trade-offs. A compact design uses a highly serialized LFSR and LWE decryption function, while a latency-optimized design uses an unrolled LFSR and a parallel datapath. We prototype lattice PUF designs with $2^{136}$ challenge-response pairs (CRPs) on a Spartan 6 FPGA. In addition to theoretical security guarantee, we evaluate empirical resistance to the various leading ML techniques: the prediction error remains above $49.76\%$ after $1$ million training CRPs. The resource-efficient design requires only $45$ slices for the PUF logic proper, and $351$ slices for a fuzzy extractor. The latency-optimized design achieves a $148X$ reduction in latency, at a $10X$ increase in PUF hardware utilization. The mean uniformity of PUF responses is $49.98\%$, the mean uniqueness is $50.00\%$, and the mean reliability is $1.26\%$.
Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Natural Language Understanding Tasks in Finance
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Natural language understanding(NLU) is challenging for finance due to the lack of annotated data and the specialized language in that domain. As a result, researchers have proposed to use pre-trained language model and multi-task learning to learn robust representations. However, aggressive fine-tuning often causes over-fitting and multi-task learning may favor tasks with significantly larger amounts data, etc. To address these problems, in this paper, we investigate model-agnostic meta-learning algorithm(MAML) in low-resource financial NLU tasks. Our contribution includes: 1. we explore the performance of MAML method with multiple types of tasks: GLUE datasets, SNLI, Sci-Tail and Financial PhraseBank; 2. we study the performance of MAML method with multiple single-type tasks: a real scenario stock price prediction problem with twitter text data. Our models achieve the state-of-the-art performance according to the experimental results, which demonstrate that our method can adapt fast and well to low-resource situations.
Social Cue Detection and Analysis Using Transfer Entropy
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Robots that work close to humans need to understand and use social cues to act in a socially acceptable manner. Social cues are a form of communication (i.e., information flow) between people. In this paper, a framework is introduced to detect and analyse a class of perceptible social cues that are nonverbal and episodic, and the related information transfer using an information-theoretic measure, namely, transfer entropy. We use a group-joining setting to demonstrate the practicality of transfer entropy for analysing communications between humans. Then we demonstrate the framework in two settings involving social interactions between humans: object-handover and person-following. Our results show that transfer entropy can identify information flows between agents and when and where they occur. Potential applications of the framework include information flow or social cue analysis for interactive robot design and socially-aware robot planning.
MotionVideoGAN: A Novel Video Generator Based on the Motion Space Learned from Image Pairs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Video generation has achieved rapid progress benefiting from high-quality renderings provided by powerful image generators. We regard the video synthesis task as generating a sequence of images sharing the same contents but varying in motions. However, most previous video synthesis frameworks based on pre-trained image generators treat content and motion generation separately, leading to unrealistic generated videos. Therefore, we design a novel framework to build the motion space, aiming to achieve content consistency and fast convergence for video generation. We present MotionVideoGAN, a novel video generator synthesizing videos based on the motion space learned by pre-trained image pair generators. Firstly, we propose an image pair generator named MotionStyleGAN to generate image pairs sharing the same contents and producing various motions. Then we manage to acquire motion codes to edit one image in the generated image pairs and keep the other unchanged. The motion codes help us edit images within the motion space since the edited image shares the same contents with the other unchanged one in image pairs. Finally, we introduce a latent code generator to produce latent code sequences using motion codes for video generation. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the most complex video dataset ever used for unconditional video generation evaluation, UCF101.
GlobalNER: Incorporating Non-local Information into Named Entity Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Nowadays, many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks see the demand for incorporating knowledge external to the local information to further improve the performance. However, there is little related work on Named Entity Recognition (NER), which is one of the foundations of NLP. Specifically, no studies were conducted on the query generation and re-ranking for retrieving the related information for the purpose of improving NER. This work demonstrates the effectiveness of a DNN-based query generation method and a mention-aware re-ranking architecture based on BERTScore particularly for NER. In the end, a state-of-the-art performance of 61.56 micro-f1 score on WNUT17 dataset is achieved.
LIDA: A Tool for Automatic Generation of Grammar-Agnostic Visualizations and Infographics using Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Systems that support users in the automatic creation of visualizations must address several subtasks - understand the semantics of data, enumerate relevant visualization goals and generate visualization specifications. In this work, we pose visualization generation as a multi-stage generation problem and argue that well-orchestrated pipelines based on large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT/GPT-4 and image generation models (IGMs) are suitable to addressing these tasks. We present LIDA, a novel tool for generating grammar-agnostic visualizations and infographics. LIDA comprises of 4 modules - A SUMMARIZER that converts data into a rich but compact natural language summary, a GOAL EXPLORER that enumerates visualization goals given the data, a VISGENERATOR that generates, refines, executes and filters visualization code and an INFOGRAPHER module that yields data-faithful stylized graphics using IGMs. LIDA provides a python api, and a hybrid user interface (direct manipulation and multilingual natural language) for interactive chart, infographics and data story generation. Learn more about the project here - https://microsoft.github.io/lida/
KDSM: An uplift modeling framework based on knowledge distillation and sample matching
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Uplift modeling aims to estimate the treatment effect on individuals, widely applied in the e-commerce platform to target persuadable customers and maximize the return of marketing activities. Among the existing uplift modeling methods, tree-based methods are adept at fitting increment and generalization, while neural-network-based models excel at predicting absolute value and precision, and these advantages have not been fully explored and combined. Also, the lack of counterfactual sample pairs is the root challenge in uplift modeling. In this paper, we proposed an uplift modeling framework based on Knowledge Distillation and Sample Matching (KDSM). The teacher model is the uplift decision tree (UpliftDT), whose structure is exploited to construct counterfactual sample pairs, and the pairwise incremental prediction is treated as another objective for the student model. Under the idea of multitask learning, the student model can achieve better performance on generalization and even surpass the teacher. Extensive offline experiments validate the universality of different combinations of teachers and student models and the superiority of KDSM measured against the baselines. In online A/B testing, the cost of each incremental room night is reduced by 6.5\%.
Towards Capacity-Aware Broker Matching: From Recommendation to Assignment
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2023
Year: 2023

Online real estate platforms are gaining increasing popularity, where a central issue is to match brokers with clients for potential housing transactions. Mainstream platforms match brokers via top-k recommendation. Yet we observe through extensive data analysis that such top-k recommendation tends to overload the top brokers, which notably degrades their service quality. In this paper, we propose to avoid such overloading in broker matching via the paradigm shift from recommendation to assignment. To this end, we design learned assignment with contextual bandits (LACB), a data-driven capacity-aware assignment scheme for broker matching which estimates broker-specific workload capacity in an online fashion and assigns brokers to clients from a global perspective to maximize the overall service quality. Extensive evaluations on synthetic and real-world datasets from an industrial online real estate platform validate the efficiency and effectiveness of our solution.
A Redistribution Framework for Diffusion Auctions
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

Redistribution mechanism design aims to redistribute the revenue collected by a truthful auction back to its participants without affecting the truthfulness. We study redistribution mechanisms for diffusion auctions, which is a new trend in mechanism design [19]. The key property of a diffusion auction is that the existing participants are incentivized to invite new participants to join the auctions. Hence, when we design redistributions, we also need to maintain this incentive. Existing redistribution mechanisms in the traditional setting are targeted at modifying the payment design of a truthful mechanism, such as the Vickrey auction. In this paper, we do not focus on one specific mechanism. Instead, we propose a general framework to redistribute the revenue back for all truthful diffusion auctions for selling a single item. The framework treats the original truthful diffusion auction as a black box, and it does not affect its truthfulness. The framework can also distribute back almost all the revenue.
Isometric Words based on Swap and Mismatch Distance
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2023
Year: 2023

An edit distance is a metric between words that quantifies how two words differ by counting the number of edit operations needed to transform one word into the other one. A word f is said isometric with respect to an edit distance if, for any pair of f-free words u and v, there exists a transformation of minimal length from u to v via the related edit operations such that all the intermediate words are also f-free. The adjective 'isometric' comes from the fact that, if the Hamming distance is considered (i.e., only mismatches), then isometric words are connected with definitions of isometric subgraphs of hypercubes. We consider the case of edit distance with swap and mismatch. We compare it with the case of mismatch only and prove some properties of isometric words that are related to particular features of their overlaps.
High-Order Elasticity Interpolants for Microstructure Simulation
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2023
Year: 2023

We propose a novel formulation of elastic materials based on high-order interpolants, which fits accurately complex elastic behaviors, but remains conservative. The proposed high-order interpolants can be regarded as a high-dimensional extension of radial basis functions, and they allow the interpolation of derivatives of elastic energy, in particular stress and stiffness. Given the proposed parameterization of elasticity models, we devise an algorithm to find optimal model parameters based on training data. We have tested our methodology for the homogenization of 2D microstructures, and we show that it succeeds to match complex behaviors with high accuracy.
Low impact agency: review and discussion
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Powerful artificial intelligence poses an existential threat if the AI decides to drastically change the world in pursuit of its goals. The hope of low-impact artificial intelligence is to incentivize AI to not do that just because this causes a large impact in the world. In this work, we first review the concept of low-impact agency and previous proposals to approach the problem, and then propose future research directions in the topic, with the goal to ensure low-impactedness is useful in making AI safe.
Unsupervised Active Visual Search with Monte Carlo planning under Uncertain Detections
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

We propose a solution for Active Visual Search of objects in an environment, whose 2D floor map is the only known information. Our solution has three key features that make it more plausible and robust to detector failures compared to state-of-the-art methods: (i) it is unsupervised as it does not need any training sessions. (ii) During the exploration, a probability distribution on the 2D floor map is updated according to an intuitive mechanism, while an improved belief update increases the effectiveness of the agent's exploration. (iii) We incorporate the awareness that an object detector may fail into the aforementioned probability modelling by exploiting the success statistics of a specific detector. Our solution is dubbed POMP-BE-PD (Pomcp-based Online Motion Planning with Belief by Exploration and Probabilistic Detection). It uses the current pose of an agent and an RGB-D observation to learn an optimal search policy, exploiting a POMDP solved by a Monte-Carlo planning approach. On the Active Vision Database benchmark, we increase the average success rate over all the environments by a significant 35% while decreasing the average path length by 4% with respect to competing methods. Thus, our results are state-of-the-art, even without using any training procedure.
MetaPhysiCa: OOD Robustness in Physics-informed Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

A fundamental challenge in physics-informed machine learning (PIML) is the design of robust PIML methods for out-of-distribution (OOD) forecasting tasks. These OOD tasks require learning-to-learn from observations of the same (ODE) dynamical system with different unknown ODE parameters, and demand accurate forecasts even under out-of-support initial conditions and out-of-support ODE parameters. In this work we propose a solution for such tasks, which we define as a meta-learning procedure for causal structure discovery (including invariant risk minimization). Using three different OOD tasks, we empirically observe that the proposed approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art PIML and deep learning methods.
Will Affective Computing Emerge from Foundation Models and General AI? A First Evaluation on ChatGPT
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

ChatGPT has shown the potential of emerging general artificial intelligence capabilities, as it has demonstrated competent performance across many natural language processing tasks. In this work, we evaluate the capabilities of ChatGPT to perform text classification on three affective computing problems, namely, big-five personality prediction, sentiment analysis, and suicide tendency detection. We utilise three baselines, a robust language model (RoBERTa-base), a legacy word model with pretrained embeddings (Word2Vec), and a simple bag-of-words baseline (BoW). Results show that the RoBERTa trained for a specific downstream task generally has a superior performance. On the other hand, ChatGPT provides decent results, and is relatively comparable to the Word2Vec and BoW baselines. ChatGPT further shows robustness against noisy data, where Word2Vec models achieve worse results due to noise. Results indicate that ChatGPT is a good generalist model that is capable of achieving good results across various problems without any specialised training, however, it is not as good as a specialised model for a downstream task.
Vectorial Genetic Programming -- Optimizing Segments for Feature Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

Vectorial Genetic Programming (Vec-GP) extends GP by allowing vectors as input features along regular, scalar features, using them by applying arithmetic operations component-wise or aggregating vectors into scalars by some aggregation function. Vec-GP also allows aggregating vectors only over a limited segment of the vector instead of the whole vector, which offers great potential but also introduces new parameters that GP has to optimize. This paper formalizes an optimization problem to analyze different strategies for optimizing a window for aggregation functions. Different strategies are presented, included random and guided sampling, where the latter leverages information from an approximated gradient. Those strategies can be applied as a simple optimization algorithm, which itself ca be applied inside a specialized mutation operator within GP. The presented results indicate, that the different random sampling strategies do not impact the overall algorithm performance significantly, and that the guided strategies suffer from becoming stuck in local optima. However, results also indicate, that there is still potential in discovering more efficient algorithms that could outperform the presented strategies.
Know Your Cybercriminal: Evaluating Attacker Preferences by Measuring Profile Sales on an Active, Leading Criminal Market for User Impersonation at Scale
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper we exploit market features proper of a leading Russian cybercrime market for user impersonation at scale to evaluate attacker preferences when purchasing stolen user profiles, and the overall economic activity of the market. We run our data collection over a period of $161$ days and collect data on a sample of $1'193$ sold user profiles out of $11'357$ advertised products in that period and their characteristics. We estimate a market trade volume of up to approximately $700$ profiles per day, corresponding to estimated daily sales of up to $4'000$ USD and an overall market revenue within the observation period between $540k$ and $715k$ USD. We find profile provision to be rather stable over time and mainly focused on European profiles, whereas actual profile acquisition varies significantly depending on other profile characteristics. Attackers' interests focus disproportionally on profiles of certain types, including those originating in North America and featuring $crypto$ resources. We model and evaluate the relative importance of different profile characteristics in the final decision of an attacker to purchase a profile, and discuss implications for defenses and risk evaluation.